It is nearing sunset; I am riding north after a day in the city, on the 5:47 out of New York Penn. Todd, one of our most venerable conductors, is conducting a game of trivia in which all of us who ride in the café car are participating. It is lovingly raucous. Some are answering the question before Todd finishes asking the question.
The commute, I don’t miss. The people I do. There is a mixture tonight of old regulars and new regulars. Annette, of Rhinebeck, is screaming answers and folks are singing the songs which are the answers to some of the questions. It is a moment wrapped in warmth.
The sun slips beneath the Catskills in a glow of burnt orange. With Trivia Time now over, we have slipped back to reading, working, with more than a few yawns stretching faces wide.
As in every day there seems to be a necessary amount of political conversations. Our google groups email list for the Empire Regulars, got slightly sidetracked into politics today until Maria, our estimable moderator, stepped in and held up the stop sign. As always, when Maria decrees, the Regulars accede.
While I am far from politically indifferent, the cascade of commentary is wearing. This is going to be a long, long haul and we must husband our strength over time and be laser focused.
Just before I boarded the train, Andrew Mer, a fellow consultant and I had a brief meeting while we discussed the Miller Center a bit and some other things. He said something I thought wise. Trump’s election has laid bare the fissures in our society we have papered over.
And Mr. Trump is helping underscore the fissures.
The attempt to repeal and replace has gone down in flames and there is even a tentative reaching out to Democrats to see what actually be done as the Freedom Caucus is intransient.
California farmers, enthusiastic supporters of Trump, are nonplussed at his immigration intentions. One said: I thought Trump was kidding. He is now anxious because his farm in California runs because of illegal immigrants.
The agony of Rockford, Illinois and other rust belt cities is now at the surface and the failure to deal with that, under both Democrats and Republicans, is a national shame, building for generations. We did not retrain people for other jobs to replace the ones not returning.
And the jobs are not returning until we look at and adapt to the revolution technology is shoving down our throats and figure out what else we can do.
The industrial revolution is coming to an end; whatever history calls this one, we need to find a new way.
The coal jobs in West Virginia probably aren’t coming back. Machines are mining what men once did. Driverless cars will toss aside the long-distance drivers, once a way to climb an economic rung. Not today, not tomorrow but someday, in a future we can almost touch, those jobs will disappear and we are not moving to educate all those people for something different.
The Trump Revolution is not dissimilar to what happened as the Industrial Revolution began the change. People rioted. Today they voted. If we don’t address the systemic issues, the next step will be riots.
The hopeful part is we somehow weathered the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and accomplished incredible things. In the last hundred years, for those in the west, our life spans have doubled, we are more educated, our lives are quite fantastic compared to that of our grandparents. There are friends of mine who are alive because of what has been achieved.
And we need to focus on the fact we are in a revolutionary period. Trump isn’t looking there nor was Hillary Clinton. Our politicians on both sides are facing the past, not the future.
The brilliance of Kennedy was he painted a picture of what could be, not what was.
We have raised the lid on the septic tank and need to clean it now.
What we are achieving technologically in this time has the promise of catapulting us to another level and very few seem to realize it and fewer still imagine how to use it for the common good.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter from Claverack June 30th, 2017 Beginning the weekend of the 4th…
July 1, 2017At some point, I decided this was the year I was going to get over my fear of grilling. Last night, I grilled a steak using a Bobby Flay recipe. And asparagus on the grill: c’est magnifique! Put the spears in a plastic bag with olive oil, salt, pepper, a couple other spices and grilled them for three minutes on high. I’m hooked.
So today I went to the market and got boneless pork chops and was going to broil them about half an hour ago but thunder rattled the house and rain fell from the skies. My mouth turned down. However, the sun has returned and I am going to try it, pork chops on the grill.
It is Friday, June 30th, as I write, the beginning of the long 4th of July weekend. As I ran an errand near the train station, I saw visitors piling off the train, bags in hand, being greeted by friends, relatives, lovers and others. Zagat, today, sent an email which had an article about 8 reasons to take the drive to Hudson; all of them being restaurants.
You can read the article here.
As someone who is here most of the time now, I took a bit of umbrage with the list. It included Grazin’, a diner restaurant with local beef and I will need to give it another try because when I was there, it wasn’t good and the wine was south of awful.
It included Fish & Game, which is, I’ve heard, a good restaurant and I haven’t been there because it opened with an attitude. I’ve been around the carousel too many times to need attitude. [Hey, once I had “my table” at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, which was cool while it lasted.]
It included, deservedly, Swoon Kitchen Bar. I don’t go there often; my ex left me for one of the waiters there; that has weighed on me ever since but it is great.
It did not include, and I think it should have, my beloved Red Dot, which is one of the hubs of Hudson nor did it include Ca’Mea, which I think should have gotten a mention nor Vico, which has upped its game lately.
We are a food town.
And now, in a break in the rain, I did grill but not the pork chops I bought as most of the recipes for grilling told me I should brine the chops and that takes some time so I grilled some sausage and finished my asparagus. Oh, so good.
Beyond my little world, it has been a bit mad.
Our President has created a twitter storm over his tweets about Mika Brzezinski’s “bleeding face lift.”
Even Paul Ryan found it too much.
Several news sources, including conservative ones, thought maybe he should have been in a meeting rather than tweeting. But no, President Trump was tweeting and creating a painful moment for his party.
And, today, NASA had to issue a statement it was not operating a slave state on Mars; it was NOT sending children there to be body parts for future colonists, a claim made by a guest on “The Alex Jones Show,” which airs on 118 radio stations. Alex Jones is most famous for claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and was interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her new NBC show, which isn’t doing so well.
As I sit here in my very hygge cottage, I am astounded by what is going on out there. We have a President who seems devoted to Twitter attacks more than he is about governing and who, according to a variety of reports, starts his day at 6:30 AM speaking to lawyers about that pesky Russian matter.
And he is going to meet with Putin at the G 20 Conference and has been asking his advisors what he can offer Vladimir Putin. What?
There are times I feel I am living in an alternative universe. And I know I am not the only one.
So, doesn’t it make sense I want to conquer my fear of grilling? That’s concrete in a world that seems spinning out of control.
Tags:Alex Jones, Bleeding Face Lift, Bobby Flay, Ca'Mea, Donald Trump, Fish & Game, G 20, Grazin, Grilling, Hudson NY, Mars, Media, Megyn Kelly, Mike Brzezinki, NASA, Paul Ryan, Politics, Putin, Red Dot, Swood Kitchen Bar, technology, Twitter, Vico, Zagat
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